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The UK and US launch of the Pixel earlier this year was the latest in the Apple-Android smartphone battle, and Google has said it hopes to sell three million of the phones by the end of this year and six million in 2017.

Among the innovations the Pixel will include from next year is the new Google Assistant, a smarter version of Google Now and Apple's Siri voice-recognition app that helps users to answer questions and complete tasks.

Pichai added: "Computing is at an exciting stage and to push computing forward we need to think about the other usage that comes with it.

"So, as computing evolves beyond the phone you will see it in more contexts. In the context of your daily life I believe you should be able to interact more naturally with it, by getting it to see things, talk naturally...we think this evolution is important, so we need to build the hardware experiences that go with it.

"That's why we developed the Pixel - so we can bring these experiences together."